In his room, he put Let It Be on the turntable and set down the needle while “Play That Funky Music, White Boy” pounded up through the floor. He offered her tea. His mom had told them: you always offer a beverage. He gave her his mug and sat in the butterfly chair. She moved her head to “I Me Mine” and told him she was a swimmer. If he just waited, he thought, something would happen.

  When the needle bumped at the disc, he turned off the light. Things were winding down outside. Then he lay next to her, and it finally began, what he’d imagined a thousand times, with Carrie. He tried to pull the reins, but couldn’t; it happened quickly, and he found himself laughing out loud. So this was sex. But the girl was a random person; he didn’t even know her name. The music hadn’t started, the soundtrack that was supposed to run under his life.

  All night he wondered if he would still be able to meet Melinda downstairs as usual. He wanted their morning doughnut. At dawn, the girl blinked her eyes open and dressed. “We do lake laps in the morning.” She smiled at him and left. He thought of his mom. You lived every day with someone and then you left, and even if they were failing, you lost your virginity; your lives weren’t interdependent anymore, though you’d once been everything to each other.

  * * *

  —

  The frat house had a balcony the guys let him hang bike frames from. He sanded while they sat above him smoking cigars.

  “Lookee there.” He heard one whistle.

  “But you know, you don’t want a cute woman,” another said. “A cute woman will expect you to take her out to nice places. She’ll ask for this and that and the other thing. What you really want is an ugly woman. An ugly woman will suck your dick.” They laughed in the twilight. “She’ll be so grateful she’ll do anything.”

  For no reason at all he thought of his mom. Had someone mocked her? That could break a person. But his mom wasn’t ugly.

  The swimmer, whose name was Cathy, came over most nights now.

  Rory stumbled downstairs using a hand to steady himself. Walter could tell from the way he stepped, dance-like and unstable, that he was buzzed. “Hey, a lot of the guys, we’ve been talking about these bikes and we think white’s a little sissy.”

  Walter counted up orders in his head. He had enough without them. He’d use the white paint.

  * * *

  —

  Cathy asked to talk. This meant either she was dumping him or wanted to go steady, Melinda said. But it was something else.

  “I’ve been faking.” She took up breath quickly. “Please don’t be mad.”

  Walter draped an arm around her and patted her back vaguely. The film archive was playing Tokyo Story. Leaves outside waved and beckoned, but he did what he was supposed to. Her hands rested on his head, guiding him as obliquely as a Ouija. He recognized the smell his brother carried as a kid from sucking two fingers. Finally, she made a noise, pulled her knees up, and curled into a C. He looked out the window. Someone downstairs put on the Stones. He wished he felt in love with her. But how did he even know what other people meant when they said that?

  * * *

  —

  Carrie wrote to him. The joke writers were all old, in their forties. This had been her mom’s idea. Her mom was big on finding things related to what they cared about—for her brother, who dreamed of becoming a stand-up comedian, an internship with an entertainment law firm. Carrie should be glad to be writing at all, according to her mom, even for a game show. They gave her stacks of magazines for inspiration. She wrote gag lines that made her literally gag. The only thing she liked about the job was the eggplant parmigiana lunch from the Source, and now her mom said the Source was run by a cult. It’s nice to be back in LA, though, she wrote. Bonfires on the beach at night.

  Walter had never been to the beach at night. Once when he was twelve, he’d taken the bus over the hill to the beach with two other boys and they’d seen graffiti on the pilings: valley go home.

  Guess that’s us, one of them said, giggling nervously.

  15.

  Lina ironed her best blouse, then blow-dried her hair. She didn’t really know how.

  “Do I look better?” she asked Donnie.

  “You look different,” he said. “I don’t know about better.”

  The sky turned deeper blue. It was five o’clock, then six. She instructed Donnie to answer the phone, then went to the alley. It took a while rummaging through the neighbor’s old newspapers to find an ad. The concert started at seven thirty. If the scooper didn’t call soon, they wouldn’t make it. A slow hour passed. Finally, she took off her good blouse, hung it up again, and put on a sweatshirt to ride her bike to the ice-cream shop.

  Weirdly, he was there, too, sitting in a back booth, flanked by two guys with strange smiles. The tall manager observed, curiously.

  “Called your number,” the scooper mumbled. “Said it was disconnected.”

  She stood there, feeling heat on her face. Their phone had been disconnected? She tried to remember the last time it had rung.

  “Spent a lot for those tickets,” a guy next to him in the booth said.

  “Maybe our phone’s broken,” she said, stupidly. They stopped talking to her then.

  She ordered an ice cream, conspicuously paid, and rode home. She left her bike on the ground, ran in, and picked up the phone. Dead. In the chalky kitchen light, she ripped through a pile of bills on the counter and found one stamped urgent. Another, from Pacific Gas and Electric, said final notice. The next morning, Lina rode her bike to an office and handed a yellow check to a woman behind a grille. They had to pay forty dollars extra to turn the service back on. That didn’t seem fair.

  “No, it don’t, do it?” the woman said. “But I got to charge you.”

  The woman’s name was Linda. Every month, Lina returned to her.

  Walter sent four twenty-dollar bills folded inside lined notebook paper. Lina gave one to Donnie. The scooper never asked her out again. She mostly understood.

  16.

  Ken invited Walter to Modesto for the Fourth of July. Bring Cathy, he said. Walter counted up the money he would lose by not working and took the weekend off. There was something pathetic about being a single man budgeting for your own pleasure, but he didn’t invite Cathy. Whatever they had seemed untranslatable into public. Rory drove and brought along a laugher named Sally. Walter sat with Melinda in the back. At the end of the long road trip, Ken stood wearing an apron under a sycamore. A stereo, connected by an extension cord, was playing classical guitar music. Ken’s parents had gone to a wedding in Sacramento, but before leaving, his mother had rolled manicotti for them.

  It felt adult to sit at a table outside with wineglasses and cloth napkins, facing rows of walnut trees. They were two couples and Walter. Ken carried out a hot casserole dish in mittened hands.

  “Did you always live here?” Sally asked.

  “We moved when I was nine. My parents wanted to live in the country. They imagined us riding horses to school. But I never liked horses and my brother’s allergic.” Sally found this hilarious. “A neighbor told my dad he could pay the property tax with walnuts. So we planted five hundred saplings by ourselves in a week. My dad’s lucky. Horse-riding turns out to be the most expensive thing a kid can do, and by the time our trees matured, more Chinese were becoming middle-class, and people wanted nuts.” Ken lit a candle on the table as the branches knit together, making the dark.

  Each of them talked about their parents. Melinda’s parents met in college, which was where they made all their friends. Since her father died, these friends were making sure her mom had something to do on the weekends.

  They talked with unusual politeness, napkins on their laps. Ken said he was afraid that after college nothing would be the same. “Friendships change for most people.”

  “My parents don’t even have friends,” Sally said.

  Ken didn’t think his parents had had friends either, until recently. The whole time he and his brother were growing up, it was only work and family. And walnuts. Sally laughed.

  “They travel with two couples now, both Asian, all doctors. They take cooking classes. She learned this in Tuscany.”

  Such good food and no parents present!

  “My folks didn’t go to college,” Rory said, “but they have friends. My dad played varsity and he still knows the guys from the team. My mom went to secretarial school after graduation, but her friends are all from the West High cheerleading squad. They don’t have careers like they want for me.” Six players from the Berkeley team injured themselves last year and the coach sent them home. Rory was beginning to understand, he said, that football might not matter so much when he got older. “It was just my way in.” Rory had to finish an incomplete. The lady poet was helping him. In the distance a train rumbled, trailing a moan.

  Walter kept quiet. He didn’t want to talk about his parents.

  “For most people,” Ken said, “college is probably the last period in their lives they spend time like this with friends.”

  “Let’s vow that that won’t happen to us,” Melinda said.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Walter took a walk after lunch to give the couples privacy. It was hot and still, the trees motionless and buzzing. A tractor rolled in the distance. Rory’s athletic talent was turning out to be worth less than he’d thought. Walter, too, had had glory whispered into his ear at home. He’d once believed he was exceptional. Watching Melinda work out chemistry reactions, he’d learned that he was only average. Architecture was easy for him, though, the way equations were for Melinda. Maybe he could plan cities. But he needed to make money. When he came to Berkeley, he’d felt lucky. His mom had always been proud of her degree; they’d carried the framed diploma from apartment to apartment. She’d considered herself equal to his classmates’ moms, even when the feeling wasn’t mutual. She’d probably feel superior to Rory’s mother. Walter’s lack of means, she thought, was due to a personal misfortune: the Afghans. Rory had a football scholarship for tuition, but his dad paid for the dorm. What would he think of Walter applying for financial aid? (Walter had turned in the papers with a note saying his mother couldn’t find her 1099. He’d applied for the scholarship, too.) Rory’s dad might not like his tax dollars paying for another father’s negligence.

  They sat on a hill watching fireworks, the girls inside the half circles of their boyfriends’ arms. Maybe he should have brought Cathy. He imagined her under the clustered walnuts still growing inside their green padded skins. Cathy was so easy to please. His mom loved him, but that was a small mark among a thousand frets. He liked being able to make someone happy.

  17.

  Lina called Walter at the fraternity and cried. He waited until she could talk. “The phone got turned off,” she finally said, and then he had to wait again. Evidently, it was back on.

  “Do you think she’s improving at all?” he asked.

  “She said she was going back to work. Then she went to sleep.”

  He would have to stick it out in chemistry. Jan Tudor made jokes about unemployed architects. If he got into medical school, he’d have a career. His kids could be architects, he thought.

  After Lina hung up, he sat in the big fraternity room, unable to move.

  * * *

  —

  He received a postcard from Carrie with only one line.

  Don’t you love the smell of the Valley summer nights?

  She could write almost nothing and it was a poem. He’d never told her that he’d once lived in the Valley, and that his mom had plotted to get them out of there. He believed that Carrie would understand everything that had happened to him. She was like a fairy tale. If he were with her, he thought, his whole life would be different.

  * * *

  —

  Cathy told him she loved being in water, where everything you heard bent and hushed. She knew, though, that no one would ever pay her to swim.

  “You could teach swimming,” he said.

  Her eyebrows pressed together. Her mother was an accountant. A swim team friend was studying nutrition. Her roommate from Beirut was majoring in feminism. Cathy planned to major in physical education or maybe nutrition, but when he asked her what would she be then, she looked cornered. “Or maybe something else,” she said. Her mind seemed a small, guarded animal.

  One morning, they drove her mom’s old Pontiac to a lake covered with a thick layer of fog. She slipped neatly into the water, a letter L tipping, hardly disrupting the surface. She could talk while swimming. He was gasping, the moon and the rising sun both in the sky.

  All day his body felt loose in a way he hoped would last.

  * * *

  —

  They went to a showing of The Apu Trilogy. Walter’s boss grabbed his tickets before they were torn and paid Walter back, out of his own wallet. Walter loved being known here. They sat in the full, expectant room as the lights dimmed. Then they were in a small town in India.

  When they came out, it was late and lights were on along Durant Avenue. If he could go to films and then come up into a lighted world, Walter would be happy. Movies—middle-class entertainment, his boss called them—were attainable pleasures. He’d begun to collect those. One of his white bikes sped by in the dark.

  They ducked into a stand-up hot dog place, next to a real restaurant. He took a napkin from the dispenser and drew. In the used bookstore, he’d studied sketches of middle-aged people in a book called The Joy of Sex. They hadn’t had a vaginal yet. They were getting close, he thought. The angle was critical. If he were higher, friction would increase. She blushed and crumpled the napkin.

  On the street, a guy from the dorm—a shoulder-rubber—opened the restaurant door for two girls, one holding a small white dog on a leash. The other was Carrie, in a sleeveless dress and tippy shoes. The shoulder-rubber had his arm on her back. It was eleven o’clock and they were going into dinner!

  “I’m just here for one night,” she said, as Walter made introductions.

  Later, Walter jerked out of bed, hearing rain. A dozen bike frames hung from the balcony. He and Cathy hauled them inside. The surfaces were pocked, traces of raindrops trenching the finish. He’d have to sand them down again. They peeled off damp clothes and slipped back into bed. Her head fitted in a spot below his shoulder. He looked down at the part in her hair and wondered if he should feel more.

  “Was I your first person?” she asked.

  He admitted it. Another gust of rain pattered the windows.

  She always scootched to the edge of the bed to put in her diaphragm, a rubbery circle that flipped like a tiny boomerang. These times together were so private they felt like experiences he had with his own body, corners of his mouth felt by his tongue.

  Wind howled in the chimneys. It was almost enough. His sketches worked. And she looked so happy afterwards. Years later, he would still remember the expression.

  I could be this person’s luck, he thought, and then, like the second beat of a footstep, but I don’t love her.

  When he held his summer bike sale, Cathy brought the whole swim team with their boyfriends. He sold out again. Success, it seemed, was only a matter of paying attention. $920. More than the last sale. But next to what he still owed and the bills piling up on the bungalow’s kitchen counter, it was barely a nick.

  18.

  All summer, the bungalow seemed to loosen and settle. Mornings stayed quiet. Donnie lay in his bed reading comic books. He liked doing things that amounted to nothing. Lina’s shifts at the ice-cream store started late in the afternoon. Most days, she rode her bike to the clay room, open for summer school, before work.

  One morning in August, Donnie and Lina heard a noise in the kitchen. The boarder was never up this early. The sky was clear outside, not yet infused with the splash of midmorning brightness. They knew from her footsteps it was their mother. They both ran and gathered around her at the stove, where she was lighting the burner.

  “I thought I’d go in today,” she said.

  They stayed near, helping her with breakfast in a way they never had before and found excuses to go in and out of her room while she dressed. She fretted about her makeup and her hair, sagging at intervals until their encouragement buoyed her and she left through the side door.

  “Do you think she can drive okay?” Lina asked.

  Julie had been taking the car around the block every week to keep it alive. Their mother drove off, slower than they remembered.

  “Her job won’t be there anymore.” Lina tried to call Julie, but there was no answer.

  Their mother came home in the middle of the afternoon and took off the outer layers first, the jewelry, the heels, then the clothes. She spent a long time washing off makeup. Then she put her nightgown back on and went to bed. She seemed content; when Donnie asked, she said it was good to see everyone, but she was tired from the drive. She slept through dinner.

  * * *

  —

  Donnie sat at the counter and, between customers, Lina made him a shake. He was hungry, and not for ice cream. They served sandwiches here, too, but Lina told him that when the tuna grew mold, they opened another three-pound can and mixed it in, to dilute the clumps. Only the ice cream was clean. She wore clogs. Everyone who worked there did. They needed the lift off the sticky floor.